Compute
Big Blue Should Start Believing In Big Iron Again
There isn’t really a systems business so much as a collection of them, all unique and all facing their own particular challenges. …
IBM
Store
An Architecture for Artificial Intelligence Storage
As we’ve talked about in the past, the focus on data – how much is being generated, where it’s being created, the tools needed to take advantage of it, the shortage of skilled talent to manage it, and so on – is rapidly changing the way enterprises are operating both in the datacenter and in the cloud and dictating many of the product roadmaps being developed by tech vendors. …
Compute
Big Blue Open Sources The Core Inside BlueGene/Q Supercomputers
Earlier this month, we were talking to the James Kulina, the new executive director of the OpenPower Foundation, which is the organization created by IBM and Google back in the summer of 2013 to create a community around the Power architecture. …
Code
Making Java Play Nice With Kubernetes
Java turned 25 years old in May, marking a quarter of a century in which it has consistently been one of the most widely used programming languages. …
Compute
OpenPower Puts Open Source Software Guru In Charge
If you want to build a successful hardware ecosystem around a chip architecture that has recently been open sourced, as the Power chip instruction set was last August, then it probably makes a lot of sense to put someone at the helm of the project who has deep and broad experience participating in the open source software ecosystem. …
Compute
The Next IBM Platform, Revisited
When IBM announced that it was acquiring Red Hat for $34 billion eighteen months ago, one of the things we said that Big Blue needed most and would get from taking over – but not messing with – the world’s largest commercial open source software company was a coherent story that it could tell to its customers about how IBM, which more than any other company helped define data processing, was still relevant to the future. …
Store
Ceph Gets Fit And Finish For Enterprise Storage
Ceph, the open source object storage born from a doctoral dissertation in 2005, has been aimed principally at highly scalable workloads found in HPC environments and, later, with hyperscalers who did not want to create their own storage anymore. …
Compute
Making The Red Hat Platform Bet Pay Off For Big Blue
In the long run of the history of International Business Machines, a conglomerate established back in 1911 whose Electric Tabulating System was custom built by Herman Hollerith for the federal government in the United States for the 1890 census and then commercialized, the acquisition of Red Hat by Big Blue might, in hindsight many years from now, turn out to be the most significant of the many transitions that IBM has undergone. …
Compute
Cache Is King
The gap between the performance of processors, broadly defined, and the performance of DRAM main memory, also broadly defined, has been an issue for at least three decades when the gap really started to open up. …
HPC
HPC In 2020: Compute Engine Diversity Gets Real
The choice of processors available for high performance computing has been on growing for a number of years. …